REVIEW / Opera's 'Iphigénie' cuts to the heart of myth in austere, intense production

IPHIGENIE_063_RAD.jpg
SHOWN: Iphigenie is sung by Susan Graham. The San Francisco Opera concludes its short summer season with "Iphigenie en Tauride." I These photos were made in San Francisco, CA. on Tuesday, June 12, 2007.
(Katy Raddatz/The Chronicle)
** Iphigenie en Tauride, Susan Graham Mandatory credit for the photographer and the San Francisco Chronicle. No sales; mags out. less

IPHIGENIE_063_RAD.jpg
SHOWN: Iphigenie is sung by Susan Graham. The San Francisco Opera concludes its short summer season with "Iphigenie en Tauride." I These photos were made in San Francisco, CA. on Tuesday, ... more

Photo: Katy Raddatz

Photo: Katy Raddatz

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IPHIGENIE_063_RAD.jpg
SHOWN: Iphigenie is sung by Susan Graham. The San Francisco Opera concludes its short summer season with "Iphigenie en Tauride." I These photos were made in San Francisco, CA. on Tuesday, June 12, 2007.
(Katy Raddatz/The Chronicle)
** Iphigenie en Tauride, Susan Graham Mandatory credit for the photographer and the San Francisco Chronicle. No sales; mags out. less

IPHIGENIE_063_RAD.jpg
SHOWN: Iphigenie is sung by Susan Graham. The San Francisco Opera concludes its short summer season with "Iphigenie en Tauride." I These photos were made in San Francisco, CA. on Tuesday, ... more

Photo: Katy Raddatz

REVIEW / Opera's 'Iphigénie' cuts to the heart of myth in austere, intense production

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Gluck's 1779 opera "Iphigénie en Tauride" wastes little time or energy on anything extraneous. It plunges swiftly into the world of Greek tragedy, and the magnificent new production that opened Thursday night at the San Francisco Opera comes through with a short, sharp shock.

Stripped of all ornament and display, Gluck's penultimate opera is a masterpiece of concentrated expressiveness. Its fluid structure is peppered with short arias, as well as choral and dance interludes.

But for the most part, this is a score as austere and potent as its ancient sources. Thursday's performance, done in Robert Carsen's brilliantly claustrophobic production and sung by a fine cast headed by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham in the title role, conveyed every bit of its primal power.

That power comes in part from the subject matter. The libretto, following Euripides, traces the last chapter in the saga of the house of Atreus, Greek mythology's most extravagantly dysfunctional family.

By the time the curtain rises, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are long dead and their son Orestes has gone into exile, pursued by the Furies for the unforgivable crime of matricide. He and his bosom companion Pylades wash ashore in the Scythian stronghold of Tauris, where his sister Iphigénie, a priestess of Diana, has been coerced by the local monarch into going into the human sacrifice game.

That's a subject Iphigénie has some firsthand experience with, since her father, headed toward the Trojan War, had offered her up to placate the gods in exchange for smooth sailing. According to this version of the story, Diana spirited her away to safety at the last minute.

So what we have here is a family reunion of sorts, effected through a fog of hidden identities, blood and trauma. And Gluck's score, with its grand, tender rhetoric and turbulent shifts in tone, captures both the story's impersonal conception of fate and the psychological depths it embodies.

Carsen's version, a company co-production with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Covent Garden, heightens the feeling of urgency.

Like this season's "Don Giovanni" but to greater emotional effect, the scheme is wholly black-on-black. Tobias Hoheisel's unit set is a stark black cube with no entrances or exits -- part abstract nocturnal landscape and part padded cell -- and Peter van Praet's virtuosic lighting darts in and out of the world of imagination ("Iphigénie" abounds with dreams, hallucinations and tortured memories).

Director Jean Michel Criqui and choreographer Philippe Giraudeau also keep the action hovering in a stylized netherworld between realism and expressionism. The chorus, representing various priestesses, Greeks and Scythians, sings from the pit, while a corps of dancers takes the same parts onstage, swirling in feverish combinations.

During the prologue, in one of the production's most harrowing inventions, dancers replicate Agamemnon's attempted sacrifice of his daughter, and the scene plays over and over again like flashes from Iphigénie's traumatized memory. Later, a brutal fight scene leaves smears of water on the black walls, turning the set into a blood-spattered abattoir.

And if the theatrical vision at work here is sleek and focused, the musical values on Thursday were no less arresting. Conductor Patrick Summers led a performance that was simultaneously vibrant and restrained, channeling all the music's tempestuous energy into elegantly classical shapes.

Graham's Iphigénie was a breathtaking blend of anguish and self-command, expressed through a vocal performance of steely virtuosity. Her tone was heroic but exquisitely modulated, with just a touch of acid to remind listeners that this suffering woman was also a princess and priestess accustomed to command.

A similar blend of pride and vulnerability shaped baritone Bo Skovhus' eloquent portrait of Orestes, his singing precise and full of feeling. Tenor Paul Groves brought clarity and ringing fervor to the role of Pylades.

The Opera Chorus, directed by Ian Robertson, dispatched its all-important assignment superbly, offering robust textures in the big chordal numbers that frame the opera's acts like Greek columns and singing with delicacy and tact in more intimate passages.

Bass-baritone Mark S. Doss sounded a little strained as Thoas, the Scythian king, but soprano Heidi Melton made an electrifying last-minute appearance as Diana, and there were good small contributions from her fellow Adler, bass-baritone Jeremy Galyon, and soprano Melody Moore.

San Francisco Opera: Glucks "Iphigénie en Tauride" plays five more times through June 29 at the War Memorial Opera House. Tickets: $25-$245. Call (415) 864-3330 or go to
www.sfopera.com
.